Saturday, June 03, 2006

[POLITICS, BUT YOU SHOULD READ IT ANYWAY] You guys down in the States, not so much.

Rolling Stone has a compelling article by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., explaining how the 2004 election was stolen, with in-depth coverage of how the Ohio election was stolen.

I didn't think exit polls could be that far off. Turns out, they weren't. It was the vote reporting that did not match the vote counting, courtesy Kenneth Blackwell, Republican secretary of state for Ohio.

I thought I was tired of being outraged. But I'm outraged all over again. The US has a president who has twice won because the rules were bent in his favor. Doesn't that piss you off?

You can argue that Bush won the popular vote, not that that mattered in 2000, but I'm not sure he would have won that either, had there been a free and fair election.

1:00 AM

2 Comments:

Hang on. Hang on. Read Farhad in Salon first:

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/06/03/kennedy/

By  DMc, at 11:36 AM  

I find the Salon article unconvincing. He claims that the Republicans were merely "incompetent" in arranging for 11-hour-long lines in heavily Democratic districts (such as Kenyon College) while suburban Republican districts had 18 minute lines. I call bullshit.

And Blackwell's attempt to invalidate Democratic voter registrations by demanding they be printed on cardstock was flagrant vote rigging.

Farhad's point seems to be, "Sure, they screwed a lot of Democratic voters out of their civil rights by illegal vote-rigging. But we can't be sure it was enough to swing the election." Well no, of course we can't be sure. Because those people didn't get to vote.

It's telling that Farhad starts his critique by saying "this is nothing new," always a sign that you're on thin ground. It's not the same as saying "this is nothing new and it has been convincingly disproven." but it means to sound like it is. Kennedy's points are new to me, and, I suspect, to most people who haven't got to read about them in the MSM because the MSM haven't bothered to raise a fuss about it.

I think the Republican habit of purging voter rolls in Democratic districts is a VERY BIG DEAL. So are (Republican-made) voting machines that record Bush votes when Kerry votes are entered. So are 98.59% voter turnouts in Bush districts. So is the Bushies declaring a bogus "FBI terror alert" to keep the media away from the vote count. The United States is supposed to have free and fair elections. Even Farhad agrees that the Ohio election wouldn't have convinced UN monitors had there been any. That SHOULD provoke mass demonstrations.

It is important to make sure that this NEVER HAPPENS AGAIN. It is unacceptable, after two elections in a row, to take the attitude that vote-stealing and vote-suppression and vote-rigging is all just "business as usual." That's how you get corrupt government.

A people gets the government it tolerates, and the government it deserves. And the people of Ohio -- and the US -- ought to be furious at they have allowed to happen to their government.

By  Alex Epstein, at 1:13 PM  

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